Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature

Clare Bradford’s Unsettling Narratives fully lives up to the claim
on the back cover that the volume will "open up an area of scholarship and discussion
[...] relatively new to the field of children’s literature." The volume is thorough,
provocative, and persuasive. The in-depth analysis of a wide range of key works
provides the framework for a conceptualisation of the relationship between
postcolonial theory and the study of children’s literature. Bradford focuses not
only on the application of theory to text but, importantly, examines in particular
the special viewpoints and perspectives that postcolonial readings can offer to
children’s literature specifically. Her discussion problematizes the popular
analogy of children as a repressed and marginalised sub-group within humanity,
just as it re-explores the shifting and ambiguous identity of other marginalised
groups.

The work is divided into two thematic parts: the first examines the various ways
in which language plays a key role in the formation and interpretation of postcolonial
children’s texts, while the second concentrates on the role played by place and
space. Within these two parts, a broad range of material is covered. Particularly
interesting is Chapter One ("Language, Resistance, Subjectivity"), in which Bradford
explores some of the ways in which language makes both resistance and subjectivity
within a particular text difficult to pin down for writer, reader, and critic.
Chapter Two ("Indigenous Texts and Publishers") focuses on the importance of publishers
to the formation and dissemination of indigenous texts, drawing into the discussion
social and political factors which have an impact upon language and text. Chapter
Three, "White Imaginings," and Chapter Four, "Telling the Past," both examine
from different perspectives the ways in which language and text are used to construct
identities. The second part of the book mirrors the first one nicely, as Chapter Five,
"Space, Time, Nation," examines both the ways in which colonial concepts of space
and nation have shaped postcolonial children’s texts, but also the strategies in
those texts to undermine and subvert dominant colonial spatial signifiers. While
Chapter Two dealt with the movement of texts and the effect of their movement on
identity, Chapter Six ("Borders, Journeys and Liminality") in converse focuses
on the movement of people and identities and ways in which their movement affects
texts. Finally, Chapters Seven ("Politics and Place") and Eight ("Allegories of
Place and Race") again deal with identity and the impact of place and space on
its formation and perception.

One of the biggest strengths of this text is the breadth of material which is
analysed in close detail: Bradford examines as many as fifteen texts in detail
to a chapter, including novels, picture books, and films, and this wealth of
material not only gives her argument a persuasive strength but also showcases the
rich material of postcolonial children’s texts which have until now been relatively
neglected. The fullness of the discussion left me wanting to read more of these
texts for myself, while the layout of the book was coherent enough, so that the
massive scope of the material did not become confusing or overwhelming.

Furthermore, much like Sydney Dobrin and Kenneth Kidd’s Wild Things: Children’s
Culture and Ecocriticism, Bradford’s Unsettling Narratives serves an
important dual purpose. In the first place it shows just how exciting it can be
to apply an established theory to the less well-explored realm of children’s
literature, opening up new perspectives and avenues of interest, and in the second
place it demonstrates just how much the field of children’s literature has to
offer to more established areas of literary criticism in terms of new material
and unexplored territory.

If there is one weakness (if it can be called that) to the book, it is that
this study cannot really be used as an introduction to postcolonial children’s
fiction. The depth of the analysis means that a certain amount of familiarity
with postcolonial theory, and with at least a few of the not-quite mainstream
children’s texts, is necessary to fully appreciate the subtlety and complexities
of the arguments put forth. If, as Bradford states in her introduction,
"[i]nterrogations of postcolonial theory itself as it applies to readings of
children’s literature are almost absent from critical discourses" (7), there is
perhaps a gap in the market for a work which lays out the "key ideas and
analytical strategies" (7) of applying postcolonial theory to children’s literature
before the analysis and interrogation that make Bradford’s work so fascinating.
Overall, this volume is coherent, thoughtprovoking, and well-written, moving beyond
the conventional and obvious analyses of race, identity, place, and language which
so often occur in the study of children’s literature, to provide a fresh insight
and a provocative new perspective.